Babylon (21 page)

 ‘It’s a mad world,’ said Cliticia, leaning against the convoluted, brass railing, her long fingernails idly picking at its flakes of verdigris as she cast her gaze about the temple grounds.

‘It would be nice if things would just... slow down,’ I said.

In the far distance was a tiny, oblique plume of smoke. It rose above the ruins as the train it emanated from passed silently on its journey to an outlying temple. And, high above, like a great, bloated sac of liquid silver, the moon loomed over the city walls and the great wildernesses and seas that lay beyond.

‘We ’ave to do it now,’ said Cliticia, staring up at the mad, mad moon. ‘We ’ave to do it before it’s too late.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now. Before it’s too late.’

‘
I
am deflowered, yet a virgin; I sanctify and am not sanctified.

Happy is he that embraceth me: for in the night season 1 am

sweet, and in the day full of pleasure. My company is a  harmony

of many symbols, and my lips sweeter than health itself. I am

harlot for such as ravish me, and a virgin with such as know me not.
’

‘Dark is she, but brilliant! Black are her wings, black on black!

She is left-handed Ishtar! Venus Spermatrix! She is Lilith,

who leadeth forth the succubi of the abyss, and leadeth man to

madness, ruin, and death! She is the irresistible fulfller of lust, and her

kiss bringeth forth the revolution of the Will and true freedom
/’

Ereshkigal’s complement of temple-maidens retired to bed at the same hour, and at that hour Cliticia and I stole from our apartment, descended to the inner courtyard, opened the unattended gates—we discovered it was something that was scandalously easy to achieve once a person was actually inside the temple—and slipped out into the grounds, taking up position close to the railway siding where
The Empress Faustina
still languished, waiting for its Duennas to take it back to Earth Prime.

Earlier, we had invoked the dark side of Ishtar: Lilith, the Black Mother, Queen of the Dark Phase of the Moon. And we had asked for her aid.

I felt the Goddess beside me. She told me to acknowledge my own moon nature, my own black, witchlike side.

We were in our nightgowns. Ankle-length, with short, ruffled, gigot sleeves, and a front panel decorated in
broderie anglaise,
they could, I suppose, have passed for shrouds. Not ones, of course, that you would expect to find in an East End undertaker’s, but rather in one of the swish, new emporia that I had heard about, such as Whiteley’s or Liberty’s.

Here, in the far south, the undying night was hot, and the thin, white cotton stuck to our perspiring flesh.

Crouched behind a cistern, we gazed out into the luminous darkness.

The foreground was of indefinite depth. It was impossible to gauge distance. But the force-field was plainly visible. It revealed itself, this close up, as a watery membrane streaked with variegated filaments of oil. And it sang, as if a church choir comprised entirely of
basso prof undos
was humming a single note. I strained my eyes to take in what lay beyond, and spied façades, colonnades, and lonely piazzas bathed in the same indigo light that stained the rest of the city like a dilute, yet indelible, ink. It was a landscape at once familiar and utterly strange. And it was made stranger by the silence—a silence thrown into relief, italicized, and made doubly manifest, by the force-field’s monotonous continuo. That silence: it was a grand, architectural form as real, perhaps more real, more palpable, than the dreamlike temples and palaces that surrounded us, and the equally distempered, rectilinear insistence of the streets.

I nudged Cliticia with my elbow.

‘Would you prefer that I did it?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, with a slight curl of her lip. ‘I’m not
totally
stupid, Madeleine Fell.’ She got up.

‘It has to be placed right next to the electromagnetic field.’

‘I
know,'
she said, between her teeth. She flicked a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and continued to stare at the shimmering curtain of energy.

The air was filled with the susurration of insect song, the perfume of night-scented flowers.

‘It has to be this way,’ I said, attempting to embolden her. ‘It has to be done from
inside
the force-field, otherwise it won’t work.’ Cliticia raised her eyes to heaven. ‘That’s why they need us,’ I added, wondering, then—and odd as it might seem, for the first time, I think—if it might be the only thing they needed us for.

‘Hoorah for Joy Division,’ she said, grinning wryly.

Taking up a bag, she walked forward to a point where she bumped into the force-field’s invisible wall. She glanced back at me, rubbing her forehead with one hand, and choking back an imprecation. Then she knelt down and attended to her task.

She opened the bag and removed a big, silken handkerchief that had been tied up into a ball. She placed it on the sandy ground. Then, after she had untied the knot, she spread the handkerchief out, as if she were about to picnic. Lying at its centre was a black, pear-shaped crystal similar to the one used by Lord Azrael to open Christ Church’s interdimensional portal.

Cliticia rose to her feet. Executing a half-turn, she looked up at the temple, its great central archway and bronze doors, its towers, gaily-tiled minarets, and the ziggurat at whose summit the Serpentessa raved in her sleep like Mrs Rochester in her attic. Her eyes filled with pity, and then with spite. She glanced back down at the ground, treating the crystal to a last, cursory inspection, as if unable to bring herself to quite believe in its efficacy, and then, spinning about on her elegant, louis heels, ran back and rejoined me behind the cistern.

No sooner had she done so than the crystal began to glow, releasing the electromagnetic vitality of the Black Sun:
vril.

Once again, I looked about me to check that we had not been observed, my gaze at last falling upon the two gynosphinxes that flanked the temple’s gates. Their elliptical, somewhat Oriental eyes gazed back evilly. They knew, of course. They knew everything there was to know about deceit and forbidden love. But those paragons of the
Via Felinus
would, I knew, keep silent, just as they had when Cliticia and I had crept through Ereshkigal’s corridors, down its staircases, and out into the surrounding grounds. And they would keep silent not merely because they were carved out of mute stone, but because they were our fellow conspirators. Men had long known as much, even during the days when Babylon was hidden. In Medieval Europe, State and Church would periodically decree that cats be ritually slaughtered, and all because of the atavistic suspicion that amongst the living walked creatures from another world—beautiful, promiscuous, and infinitely treacherous young women who brought princes and cardinals under the yoke of the Goddess’s dark will.

The force-field shuddered, its multicoloured striations deliquescing into the same deep-blue light that pervaded all Babylon—a light that, however beautiful and mysterious it might be, possessed no virtue of interdiction. The humming stopped.

Out of the shadows stepped a small party of Minotaurs, one of the many
Einsatzgruppen
whose camps were deployed throughout the ruins. Amongst their number were Lord Azrael and Malachi. They wore the same kind of leather tunic and peaked cap that Cliticia had briefly appropriated and which had contributed to her impromptu little performance in our tent. Tight-fitting leather breeches, riding boots, and shoulder holsters completed their uniform.

As did the insignia of the Black Sun.

Cliticia and I ran to greet them.

The train sped through the night.

Lord Azrael sat opposite me. ‘The clearest notion we can form of degeneracy is to regard it as
a morbid deviation from an original type,’
he said. ‘Patricians, who rightfully rule those who worship earthly gods and mother goddesses, know this well: that the modern world is characterized, not by upward evolution, but by a downward path into the
degeneracy
that I have spoken of.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘I understand. Given what I’ve done, I can hardly consider myself exempt from such criticism.’ Lord Azrael and his irregulars had commandeered
The Empress Faustina.
The train had idled in its sidings, a cocotte that—if seemingly cold as iron—had, like us, been merely waiting to be taken.

I glanced down the carriage. It was packed, of course, with girls who, it must be admitted, had joined this excursion somewhat less willingly than Cliticia and myself. (Indeed, many had been dragged screaming from their beds). But it was equally evident that each glum, apprehensive, or frankly shock-stunned face was invested with a barely concealed taint of excitement. My sympathies were compromised. If I shared a train with several hundred young women bound for captivity, or worse, then the concomitant feeling—however misplaced—of belonging to a party of fidgety schoolgirls on a day trip to Clacton or Southend-on-sea made it difficult to feel genuine pity.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. ‘Once,’ I said, ‘my own Order argued that men couldn’t meet the Goddess face to face. Not if men wished to preserve their sanity. And so Ishtar incarnated herself in our flesh. We became intermediaries. But now—’

‘Now your Order is corrupt.’ He sawed his hand through the air. ‘It must be cleansed, must it not?’

I shook my head, once, twice, and then again and again, each time more wildly than before. ‘Am I really so like the others?’ I bit my lip, forced myself to sit ramrod straight, and then looked him squarely in the face. ‘I mean, I’m a member of Joy Division, aren’t I? Not just, not just—’ Vermin, I thought, with unwonted acuity. That is how they thought of us, after all. To the men of the Black Order, we had renounced our humanity upon volunteering, and become vermin, beautiful vermin. The marginal sense I had had of being on a holiday jaunt swiftly left me, romantic excitement replaced by a thrill of panic. ‘Oh God, please tell me I’ve done the right thing. Please!’

He let his head loll onto the back of his seat. ‘Oh, Miss Fell, Miss Fell, Miss Fell... ’

I felt the blood rising to my cheeks. I looked away, thinking my eyes might be growing as glazed as the insect-slicked window-pane, and as full of strange, too-revealing sights.

The Euphrates lay to the west, the Processional Way to the east, and the canal Libilhegalla to the north.

Three- and four-storey houses lined the canal, their brickwork enamelled with a green crust. The stagnant water had, at some indeterminate time in the past, obviously colonized the surrounding flatlands. There was a rumble as the train passed over an iron bridge, the noise of the wheels eliding from their usual
clickety-clack
into a dull, booming
ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum.
Dragonflies impacted against the windows; a smell of wet decay filled the air; and then Libilhegalla was behind us.

To the fore was the delirious mélange of architecture that had, by now, become a commonplace sight. But the confusion of form had become unusually concentrated. So much so, in fact, that it became impossible to tell where the ancient left off and the modern began.

Everything suggested a terminal stage of monumentality—a transformation of shadows into matter that, here, at the city’s blighted heart, had come to an evolutionary dead-end. Everything suggested the oeuvre of a megalomaniac: piazzas; watchtowers; colossal stone figures petrified as if by the lethality of the moonlight; giddy flights of stairs running nowhere; landings, scaffolding, twilit halls; colonnades receding into infinity; massive siegeworks; gaping holes in visionary Bastilles that revealed mighty engines, wheels, cables, treadmills, and catapults; Elysian pleasure gardens that had come to resemble the overgrown exercise yards of abandoned Bedlams and Pandemoniums; roofless cathedrals whose rose windows displayed gigantic iron crosses commemorating the crucified Magdalene, or the Goddess herself; spider webs spun by the equally gigantic, man-eating wolf spiders of the Sumerian jungles and marsh lands that lay beyond the city walls to the far south.

The mass of crazed, anarchic architecture had overwhelmed the city’s precise, mathematical ground plan. And all this monstrous tumult of line and perspective—this realization of a fever dream, or the gloomiest of Gothic novels—languished in an unholy disquiet of silence, like a scuttled ocean liner beneath the cruel, voiceless waves.

Yes. I had been a stowaway, and my voyage was coming to an end. I had come to the very centre of the labyrinth. Oh, Mum and Dad, I thought, I’m so sorry, so sorry. But all this is inevitable. I never had a choice. When I was little, the labyrinth opened, and— like a child weaned upon the night—I began to explore its perilous depths. Soon, I was lost, and all my attempts to find a way out only led me further in. Forgive me. But this is the place I have been travelling to all my life. And if I am cruel, it is only because the labyrinth has always been my only hope of love.

For some time now I had been able to descry Etemenanki. Even from a considerable distance I could tell that it was huge. Indeed, it was without doubt the tallest building in Babylon. High above the Northern Citadel—that vast complex whose splendours included the Palace of Nebuchadnezzar-—and foregrounding it in shadows, it had been built by Nimrod, the nephew of Cham, Noah’s son. It was the same Tower of Babel that, on Earth, had been swallowed up by the desert. Etemenanki had been built to glorify the might of the kings of Babylon. But its off-world counterpart had succumbed to the same mongrelization of style that affected so much of the city’s architecture. Each new century had brought modifications and additions, until the original tower had disappeared beneath a weight of Graeco-Roman columns, Gothic buttresses, and Baroque and neo-Palladian porticos and spires. Now it glorified only the aesthetic turmoil and anarchy that became more extreme the closer we drew to our destination.

Lord Azrael got up, leant over me, pulled down the shutter, and then resumed his seat.

‘And when we reach the Citadel, I will become a slave?’ I asked. A slave. How easily that word tripped off my tongue. We made slaves of men. The world was a slave to the Illuminati. And we, in turn, longed to become slaves to the Black Order. In this life the only reality was power: not only the power to enslave, but the power to submit, too. And in offering myself, I knew that that power would free me. I was no longer a goose girl. I was no longer a whore. I was the World’s Desire. ‘Your slave?’ I added. My mouth became dry. I swallowed.

He shook his head—not, I think, to deny me hope, but to indicate a measure of wonder at my naïveté. ‘You are such an intelligent, well informed young lady, Miss Fell, that you must surely perceive how things stand?’ I continued to avoid his gaze, the sound of wheels over rails—which had reverted to the usual
clickety-clack
—mimicking the rattle of blood in my temples.

The air was close. It was filled with the scent of leather. Of leather tunics, breeches, riding boots, and peaked caps. I was beginning to feel quite sick.

‘For untold millennia,’ he said, ‘our two races have been locked in cosmic combat. And there have been those amongst the Black Order who have indeed argued that, if the Shulamites are not assimilable into European culture, they must serve us as our slaves, or playthings. But you would be our Delilahs, I fear, shearing us of our strength and purpose.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘When we Aryans lived in Thule we were masters of the Earth. But we lost our birthright by lying with a subhuman, halfanimal race. Such races are always linked to Earth cults. And as such, they are irresistibly seductive.’ He sighed. ‘You, Miss Fell, are a descendant of that ancient, evil race. And I fear that you would seduce me, too. You would divert me, corrupt me, and rob me of my potency.’ He sighed again, and this time, with something approaching passion. ‘It goes without saying that if we
are
to be together then you must be made pure.’

‘Pure?’ I said, a little affronted.

‘I do not speak ill of your character, Miss Fell.’

‘I have never, I have
never
—’ To my surprise, I was becoming angry. And anger, perhaps, resurrected what was left of my better judgement. Milord certainly had a gab on him, I told myself. Who on earth did he think he was? And I began to think of what the Serpentessa had said, of how all the high, mighty talk of Hyperborea and Thule was, perhaps, nothing more than a fairy tale.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, his voice hinting at some deep and subtle pain too horrible, too magnificent, to share. ‘The very last thing that I want to do is cause you offence.’ He massaged his forehead. ‘Or hurt you,’ he concluded.

And it was then—as I wondered if I were listening to a proposal, if not of marriage, then of something far, far more honourable—that I wondered if it really mattered who he was.

I strove to calm myself, and put criticism behind me, as befits the fairer, gentler, and more gloriously irrational, sex.

‘You see, for us, purity is a prerequisite,’ he said.

‘A prerequisite to what?’

‘It is an absolute,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘Without it, we cannot—’

‘Please, you don’t have to explain,’ I said, regretting my earlier outburst. It hardly fell to me to stand on my dignity. ‘I too am sorry.’ I breathed deep, my ribcage swelling with unaccustomed, and not entirely welcome, freedom, so much, of late, had I come to rely upon the voluptuous narcotic of my stays. ‘I do not think I have to tell you how much I admire you, Lord Azrael,’ I added. ‘If you wish me to renounce Ishtar, then—’

‘You and me, Miss Fell,’ he said, seemingly at pains to override, not only my anxieties, but his own, by returning to the safety of his fairy-tale world, ‘and all others like us—it falls to us to usher in the New Order that will represent a union between the Sun and the Moon. Only then will Man live as a totality with the Light and Dark polarities of his soul returned to balance.’ He placed his elbows on his knees and leant forward, looking me in the eye. ‘A New Order, Miss Fell—think of it! In this Kali-Yuga, all forms of life are at each other’s throats. Pain, fear, and death are the result. What kind of God perpetuates such misery?’ He extended a hand and took a lock of my hair between his forefinger and thumb. ‘Long ago, there was a solar age. An age of gold.’ And then he frowned, like a prospector who, after a lifetime’s experience, discovers he can no longer distinguish between fool’s gold and the real thing. ‘But we are not merely of different bloodlines, Miss Fell, we were made by different gods. My god is the god of light. But your god?’ His face became hard, yet sad and noble, too, like that of a philosopher who must be cruel to be kind. ‘Your god is the Demiurge, the creator of the inferior beings my people confined to Sumi-An when, half a billion years ago, we lived amongst the stars.’ He took a handful of hair into his fist and gently, gently pulled me forward. ‘Your god,’ he murmured, as his lips touched mine. ‘Your god, Miss Fell, is Jehovah.’

The train slowed down. The armed men who had come to meet us walked alongside the carriages, keeping pace. As we passed beneath the gate of Beltis—a massive arch flanked by two winged bulls—the train blew its whistle, a great streamer of smoke and steam unravelling across the moon-haunted sky.

Lord Azrael had pulled up the shutter so that I might see the marvels that awaited me: sheer walls of brightly-coloured brick that were like the precipices of a vast Himalayan mountain range, decorated, perhaps, at the chimerical whim of legions of Hindoo craftsmen and engineers; towers, campaniles, and minarets; and rows upon rows of marble columns that supported the cloud-capped heights of the many-tiered Palace of Nebuchadnezzar.

But most marvellous of all had been my first sight of the gardens.

On Earth, Nebuchadnezzar had constructed vast, hydraulic-served terraces to remind his wife, Amyitis, daughter of the King of the Medes, of the beauty of her native land. Here, they served to remind Ishtar’s temple-maidens that their adopted home possessed an unearthly beauty of its own. Like all off-world vegetation, the flowers that bedecked the Hanging Gardens ingested, not the light of the sun, but the light of the moon; consequently they were a bizarre, and quite alien, riot of blue— infinitely varied, subtle, and wholly alien shades of indigo, cyan, azure, sapphire, aquamarine, and turquoise.

We pulled into a station. Great, cast-iron girders and arabesques, such as distinguished London’s railway termini, arched over us, like the ribs of a decomposed whale. Iron pillars and trelliswork lined the platform. The engine groaned; steam billowed, like mist rising from the damp bracken of a moor. And then, with a judder that announced our arrival, the mist receded. Outside the window stood a disused ticket booth, and, a little further on, ragged streamers and a dozen, moth-eaten national flags: testament that, in the not-too-distant past, before the Citadel had fallen into the clutches of the Men, our arrival might have occasioned cheers, speeches from Duennas and High Priestesses, and the striking up of a brass band.